A Candidate’s Progress (10): Read into it what you will.

People keep asking me: “How’s your campaign going?”

Most of my closer friends get the joke when I answer: “Swimmingly.”

(For those unfamiliar with irony, my eccentricities, or both, it’s because I don’t know how to swim).

As I suspected from the very start, there has been very little available time to “campaign” -- depending on what is meant by the concept.

For those seeking to judge campaigns by the unleashed density of garish and illegally placed yard signs at major intersections, I’ve conducted no campaign at all; for those pre-disposed to oppose, my absence of signs is proof that I’m not serious.

However, it remains that if I would have spent thousands of dollars on signs and blanketed the city with visual pollution, these same members of my un-fan club would have accused me of trying to buy the election with money supplied by the same oligarchs and political relics I ritually oppose.

In other words, that’s politics – or what passes for it in New Albany: Land of the free to be perpetually dumbfounded.

In fact, I’m perfectly serious about my campaign. I’ve been campaigning where I drink beer, and periodically drinking beer where I campaign. It’s simple and straight up: Given the Democratic primary field of candidates for three at-large council seats, I’m as qualified as any, and more qualified than a few.

At the blog, in the newspaper, on countless street corners and atop a barstool or two, I’ve sallied forth with my views. I’ve always signed my name to them, and this fact alone is noteworthy. Contrary to the paranoid and often anonymous visions habitually passing as “facts” hereabouts, I’ve promised only this to inquiring voters: If elected, I will learn, think and reason.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I appreciate your support.

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I’d read all day if permitted to do so, but the responsibilities of adulthood have an annoying tendency to intrude upon well intentioned plans.

In yesterday’s New York Times book review section, three books of interest to me were reviewed.

When they become available, I’ll purchase them from Destinations Booksellers (not Amazon), and place at the bottom of an ever-shifting stack of books that take me far too long to finish. I’ll continue to grind away until I get to them. Life is regrettably short when it comes to reading, isn't it?

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Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley: Team of Rivals

"Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe," by Jonathan Jordan. Reviewed by Michael Korda.

... To read about Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton today is to imagine how dismayed and angry they would be to see small packets of American troops spread out over a hostile landscape, defending themselves against endless attacks by an enemy that vanishes when pursued, in a war in which American speed, mobility and firepower count for nothing, and where nobody has as yet defined what “victory” would look like.

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Why the Eichmann Trial Really Mattered

"The Eichmann Trial," by Deborah Lipstadt. Reviewed by Franklin Foer.

... (The prosecutor's) strategy placed the survivors at the center of the trial, the first time that the world had heard from them at such length. According to Lipstadt, this was the moment the survivors acquired their moral stature. And their testimony was the reason the Eichmann trial so shook the world.

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The Prehistory of Baseball

"Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game," by John Thorn. Reviewed by Bruce Weber.

... Thorn has a vexingly complicated story to tell, and one of the strengths of this book is that he shies from none of the complexities. The development of the game took place off the field as much as it did on, and Thorn scrupulously traces the influence of a variety of social forces on its progress and popularity, among them gambling, the emergence of star players and the rise of theosophy, a spiritualist movement whose adherents included Doubleday and his chief backer as the game’s inventor, Albert G. Spalding.